2020-03-13 - The Call

He wakes up with a shout and a start in his own bed, in the cabin, a little before dawn. They'd waited until he came back out here to swing the scythe and come for Their share, making sure he'd be alone, no one to support him. No one to remind him it was Them and not his reality.

How long had he dug under that blasted out car looking for Eleanor? How long had he sat in that prison cell, hearing people die? How long had he run when they'd escaped, how many had died? How long had that strange old woman with the red and black house kept him, asking him winding question after winding question?

He'd finally answered her in a way she liked, or so he thought, because she'd let him go. But not before she said one last thing to him: "It will take more than courage to survive what's coming." Then she'd shut the door in his face.

The wounds he took in the Veil forest are bleeding anew, soaking through the bandages. He'll have to burn these sheets. His head's spinning, he's aching all over. He feels like an empty pitcher, like he's poured all of himself out and now there's just this shell, lying in his bed, in his cabin. August Roen is dead, this man is what's left.

The aching complaint of his back brings him out of his fugue of the Dream's memories. He realizes he's straining to hear something: a strand of music, a whisper of poetry. He thinks it must be the animals, but it's not. A simple touch to their minds reveals to him they're all sound asleep.

He gets out of bed, bleeding, feverish, and stumbles downstairs. He barely remembers to put on some shoes and pull on a coat.

The call is louder outside. He starts walking. Out the perimeter fence (did he remember his keys?), onto a game trail. Off that game trail and into the forest, listening.

He's not sure how long he walks, but by the time he reaches the source, he's sweating heavily through the fever and the pain and pretty sure he should call someone. Except he's made it, he's there.

It's a small glade, protected by old, tall ever greens. There's a deer skeleton in the middle, empty eyes staring at the sky, proud antlers gleaming white to his sense of the Art. He walks to it, reaches out to grip an antler tip in his hand, hard enough to draw blood.

There are maple saplings growing between the bones, rangey and naked, their leaves a brown mat inside the skeleton. He sighs at them. "How do I do this."

They don't have an answer. He stands there a time, hot tears growing cold on his face. He's trapped in a Devil's Bargain; if he doesn't use the Art, a little girl does and it's her they tear apart inside, while her father watches, helpless. If he uses it, this is his reward: waking up half out of his mind.

Something else does have an answer for him, it turns out. Something with shining blue eyes, lurking in the shadows along the treeline. He can't make out what it is, but sees the suggestion of a low, prowling form, spines bristling from its back, long teeth in a short snout, and a barbed tail.

He stares at it. It stares back. Had it drawn him out here? Or had something else?

The creature explodes out of the undergrowth--it's a cross between a hyena and a porcupine, he thinks--charges at him across the clearing. He stumbles back, reaches out to the shaping Art, almost panicked, it's moving damned fast and he doesn't have a lot of time to--

A tall oak, stark in its winter finery of dead brown leaves, leans over and swats the beast, sending it flying into the forest. August thinks he can feel the creatures claws and teeth only just miss him. It howls in pain, crashes somewhere in the distance. He hears the sounds of it thrashing, then moving.

Retreating.

He stares at the oak, which is now still. There's no indication it just did that, no sign batted the creature as though it were nothing more than an errant, misbehaving puppy. No strange face on it like the Veil trees had born. It's just an oak.

It takes him a little while to work up the courage, but presently, August reaches out to the other trees, through the veins riddling them, down into the roots and up into their branches and needles. His sense of them's deeper and broader than before, more akin to how smaller plants feel. He can direct them, shape them completely. Move them, if he wants, though Finch said that seems to kill them, now.

Presently it occurs to him he's half-freezing to death in the winter night air, probably giving himself pneumonia. He can't get married in fall if he dies of a self-inflicted illness tonight, and Eleanor and Itzhak will be hilariously pissed at him if he lets that happen.

He tromps back to the cabin, shivering and bloody, the old woman's voice still in his ears, now mingled with the voice of the maples calling him out to the glade.